Fellowship of the Talisman Page 17

  The fen was a fearsome place, Duncan told himself, sitting by the fire, fearsome in its far-reaching flatness, in its empty loneliness, a stretch of watery wilderness that reached as far as one could see — not a lake, nor yet a marsh, but a place of many little ponds and sluggish streams, separated with rank-growing small groves of willows and other water-loving shrubs and trees. Dropped in the middle of it, a man would be hard put to find his way safely out.

  Conrad, sitting across the fire from Duncan, said, “We came out of it well, m’lord. We not only saved our necks, but got back all of our belongings — your sword, the amulet — plus some other welcome plunder.”

  “I’m sorry about Old Cedric,” Duncan said.

  “We should have stayed to bury him,” said Andrew. “If not the others, at least Cedric. He deserved that much from us.”

  “We would have done him no great favor,” Conrad told the hermit. “No matter how deep we might have dug his grave, the wolves would have him out of it in a day or two.”

  “It was getting late,” said Duncan. “We had only a couple of hours till dark. I wanted to be well up the strand before the sun had set.”

  Ghost came floating in. He hovered between them and the fen.

  “Well, finally,” said Andrew, considerably disgusted. “Where have you been all this time? We have been in trouble…”

  “In trouble I knew you were,” said Ghost. “I came back last night and glimpsed the trouble you were in. I did not show myself, for immaterial as I am, I knew that I, all by myself, could be of no help at all. So immediately I went off in search of Snoopy or perhaps of others of his kind, hoping to summon them to provide what aid they could. But I could not find them…”

  “That Snoopy!” Andrew said. “He is as worthless and as irresponsible as you are, yourself. I tell you, he is not one to trust. No good will ever come of him.”

  “He helped us the other night,” said Duncan. “At the Jesus of the Hills. He warned us to get out of there. He showed us the way.”

  “Well, every now and then,” conceded the hermit, “he may be of some small help. When the notion strikes him. But he’s no one to depend on. You’ll break your neck if you depend on him. There’s a deep sense of mischief in him.”

  “I am happy to report,” said Ghost, “that there is no present danger. Whatever hairless ones there may be still about are well beyond the hills, on the other side of them.”

  “The hairless ones were here this morning,” Conrad said. “They did in the Reaver.”

  “That I know,” said Ghost. “But they did not linger. They now are far away.”

  “The Reaver and his men may have been hiding in the rift,” said Duncan. “That may be why no one saw them. You are sure the hairless ones are not hiding in the rift?”

  “Sure I am,” said Ghost. “I just came from there. The selfsame thought had occurred to me. I am straight from there.

  I traveled its entire length.” He shuddered. “A terrifying place,” he said.

  “Beyond it,” said Duncan, “there should be a castle. That is what Snoopy said.”

  “What once had been a castle. A ruin now, no more. The stones have fallen in. It’s no better than a mound. Trees grow out of it and mosses cover it.”

  Meg, crouched in a place of her own beside the fire, away from the rest of them, was muttering to herself. She had picked up some pebbles and seemed to be playing some sort of game with them.

  “You are casting runes,” said Andrew, distaste in his voice. “What do they tell you? What do you see for us?”

  “Trouble,” said the witch. “New trouble. Great trouble.” Duncan said, “We’ve had our trouble, old grandmother.

  We have had our share of it.”

  “No one has his share of it,” said Meg. “It’s not equally divided. Some know nothing but travail and trouble, others none at all.”

  “Can you tell us what shape it may take?” asked Conrad. “So we can be ready when it strikes.”

  “The runes do not tell me that much. Only that trouble lies on the road ahead.”

  “A fake you are,” said Andrew. “It all is fakery. Those are not runes you have. They are no more than pebbles.

  Runes are stones that have certain magic marks upon them.”

  “That’s unkind of you to say,” Duncan told the hermit. “We must think the woman knows her art.”

  “Well spoke,” said Meg, “and I thank you, sire. One who knows the art can pick up any stone and it will serve the purpose. The secret lies not in the stone at all, but in the knowledge of the thrower.”

  “One thing you may tell me,” Duncan said. “I think that you might know. What is this keening we hear from off the fen? It has the sound of sorrow in it.”

  “It is sorrow,” said Meg. “It is sorrow for the world. For all life upon this Earth. For men and everything that now exists or that existed before there were any men.”

  “You speak sacrilege,” said Andrew. “I’ve heard this somewhere before, not too long ago, and then I did not speak of it. But now I speak of it. The Book tells us there was no life before men, that all life was created on the selfsame day.

  In Genesis, it is written …”

  Duncan interrupted him. “Softly, my friend,” he said. “There are some great doctors, students of the rocks, who think otherwise. They have found imprints on the stones…”

  “Also I have heard of that,” said Andrew wrathfully. “I place no credence in it. It all is sophistry.”

  “Each man to his own belief,” said Duncan. “We will not argue it.” He said to Meg, “Sorrow, you say. From whom or whence comes this sorrow?”

  “I do not know,” said Meg. “That is hidden from me. What I do know is that in many places in the world there come these sounds of sorrow. Desolate places, lonely and forsaken places. A wailing for the world.”

  Duncan sat and listened to the wailing for the world. It seemed to come from some distant place, not necessarily from the fen, although it came across the fen — perhaps, he thought, from some secret place where the miseries and the disappointments of the world came to a common focus. A wailing for all the events that could have been, but did not come to be, for the crusade that never got off to a decent start, leaving Jerusalem still in the hands of infidels; for the Iberian ships that never clove the ocean waves to those ports and the unknown lands that still were waiting for them; for the Europe that still lay stagnant, plowing its worn-out soils with the plows that had been used for centuries, with the peasantry, for the most part, still huddling in dark and noisome hovels; with pools of paganism still remaining, some of them almost within the shadow of the magnificence of churches that had been reared up, with Christian sweat and prayer, to proclaim the glory of the Lord.

  An evil force, His Grace had said, that battened and fattened on mankind’s misery, that moved upon strategic crisis points to guarantee continuation of the misery. That Evil in the past had struck in many places, at strategic points, and now it had struck in Britain. What factors were there that might make Britain a strategic place to strike? Britain, through all history, had been a place of quiet, a backwater of the world, where there might be local squabbling and some small clash of arms, but an area that had never loomed large in the consideration of the world.

  “Fair sir,” said Ghost, moving over to him, “I believe I have not done too badly. I have been faithful in my scouting.

  I have ever told you truth.”

  “You have been loyal,” said Duncan, “although I do not understand your loyalty. There is no reason in the world you should be loyal to me.”

  “You told me once, however, that you would not invite me to go along with you, although you said you saw no way that you could stop me going. It was not a remark, I know, that was meant to be unkind, but ever since it has rankled in my breast.”

  “And what do you think that I should say?” asked Duncan. “That given another chance, I would have invited you? I don’t know if I can say that, although I can
say something else. I am glad you chose to come along.”

  “You truly mean that, sir?”

  “I most sincerely mean it, Ghost.”

  “Then,” said Ghost, “I shall continue with a lighter heart. When would you estimate, sir, we will arrive in Oxenford?

  I am very anxious to hunt out a reverend doctor there and discuss my case with him.”

  “At the rate that we’ve been going, we may never get there.”

  “You cannot mean that, sir.”

  “No, I suppose I don’t. Someday we will be in Oxenford.”

  But even as he said it he wondered if they would. They had covered, so far, not too many miles, and if they took too much longer, Bishop Wise might well be dead before the manuscript could be placed into his hands. And should the good bishop not be there, their journey would have been a foolish errand at the best.

  It would help, he thought, if they could only know the location of the Horde of Harriers. They must be somewhere in northern Britain, perhaps in congregation for that strange procedure that would bring about their rejuvenation. It certainly must now be time, he thought, for the procedure to begin, for surely they had carved out to its fullest extent that area of desolation designed to protect them from any interference. It might be, he thought, that the Harriers had thrown roadblocks in his path for the simple reason that he was inadvertently heading straight for their congregation, thereby posing that possibility of interference they must guard against. If it could only be known where they were, he and his band could swing wide around them, and the Harriers then might let them be.

  He thought back once again along the trail that they had traveled, hoping by doing this to pick up some clue that would be useful in planning their further progress. But in thinking back along their trail, he thought again of Diane and her griffin. And try as hard as he might to see her simply as an incident of their travel, his mind hung back and clung to the memory of her. He tried to rebuild her in his mind, to re-create the memory that he held of her, but he found that he was unable to accomplish this. All that remained was the memory of the axe that she had carried and the griffin she had ridden. What color was her hair? He was astonished to find that he did not know. What color were her eyes? Again he could not say. And the shape of her face, he found, now had quite escaped him. Thinking back, he realized that he had thought of her, had even watched for her, every day since they first had met — which had been just a few days earlier, but which seemed, for some reason, to be much longer ago than it was in actuality.

  Why, he wondered, was he so obsessed with her — not knowing in his own mind that he was obsessed with her, but still thinking of her, in idle moments, each day since he had seen her.

  “M’lord,” said Conrad, “a fog is beginning to roll in. We must keep sharp watch tonight.”

  What Conrad said was true. In the last few minutes, a fog had risen from the fen high into the air and now was creeping in toward them. From the fen still came, somewhat muffled by the rising, thickening fog, the keening sound — the wailing for the world.

  19

  They reached the end of the strand when the sun was well down the western sky, and entered the rift. It was a narrow cleft between two towering walls of rock, as if sometime in the far past a giant, wielding a heavy sword, had cleft the mountain in a single stroke. Blowing sand from the strand had drifted for a short distance into the rift, lying in ripples and low dunes, pocked by the tracks of men and horses, probably made by the Reaver’s band. But within a few rods the sand ended and the bottom of the rift was a solid rock. For a short stretch it would be as level as a floor, then would be rough and broken for a time, often almost blocked by slabs of stone that in the past peeled off the rocky walls and tumbled down into the bottom of the cleft. There was no vegetation — no blade of grass, no small shrubs or trees rooted desperately to the walls of solid rock. A steady, relentless wind funneled through the rift, moving from the fen. High in the chasm, the rushing winds howled and wailed, at times shrinking to a whisper, at others rising to a shrill and doleful lamentation.

  They took up automatically the order of march they had used since starting from the village — Tiny leading, but staying much closer than he had in open country, with Conrad following, behind Conrad, Beauty and the hermit, going in single file now, for often there was not room for them to walk side by side. Behind the two of them came Duncan, with Daniel close upon his heels, Meg huddled on the horse’s back, clutching the saddle to guard against a misstep that might be brought upon Daniel by the uneven footing.

  The rift lay in deep twilight. Only for a few moments during the day, when the sun was directly overhead, did any sunlight ever reach the floor. The upper portions of the eastern wall were lighted by the sun, but as the day went on, the shadow crept higher up the wall, with the slice of sunlight growing less and less and the shadow deepening in the lower reaches of the rift.

  Duncan had the feeling that they were walking in the bottom of a well, isolated from the world outside, cut off from all that might be happening there — cut off, perhaps, but not protected, for the place, he knew, could be a trap.

  They had routinely taken up their accustomed order of march, and while that might have been all right in more open country, Duncan realized that it was wrong here. With room to maneuver, Daniel, bringing up the rear, could swing about to face any danger that might come up behind him. Here he had little room to maneuver; there were places on the trail where he would have been unable to turn around. Duncan squeezed himself against the right hand wall of rock and when Daniel, seeing him stop, also stopped, his master urged him ahead. “It’s all right, boy,” he told the horse. “I want to take up the rear.” If danger presented itself at the head of the march, he told himself, Tiny and Conrad could hold it off until he could manage to join them.

  Stepping carefully, almost daintily, Daniel walked past him, his hairy body pressing Duncan hard against the rock wall. Duncan said to Meg, “Keep close watch ahead. If anything appears to be happening up there, let me know at once.”

  Overhead the wind moaned and screamed. Except for that, however, the only sounds were the ring of Daniel’s iron-shod hoofs against the rock, the pitter-patter clacking of Beauty’s little hoofs as she hurried along.

  Plodding along behind Daniel, Duncan put his hand down to the belt pouch, which he had retrieved and resewn onto his belt, felt beneath his fingers the yielding crackle of the manuscript. Shifting his hand down, he encountered the small bulk of Wulfert’s amulet, recovered from the Reaver’s pocket. At the feel of it he felt reassured. Something had operated to bring them safely through all the dangers they had faced, and he felt certain that it could not have been happenstance alone. Could it have been the amulet? Might it not, through the years that it had lain in Wulfert’s tomb, have reinforced its magic, as a good brandy might acquire better flavor and bouquet from aging? But magic or not, he told himself, potent or weak, he felt the better for having it again.

  Time went on and the shadow crept slowly up the left wall of the rock. There was no sign that the rift was coming to an end; no daylight loomed ahead. They perforce were going at a slow rate, but by this time they should be nearing the end. What was it Snoopy had said, only five miles or so? Although, as Andrew insisted, one probably could not place much reliance upon anything that the goblin said. If the goblin were anywhere close to right, even at their slow rate they should have covered the distance by this time. For a moment Duncan entertained the fantasy that the rift would never end; that there was a magic laid upon it that would keep it going on forever; that they would never reach the end of it.

  For considerable time it had seemed to him that the sounds made by the wind in the upper part of the chasm had been changing, becoming no longer merely the sound of wind, but the sound of voices, as if a congress of damned souls might be screeching and shrieking, yelling back and forth in unintelligible words.

  A lull came in the wind and the sound ceased and for a long moment all was death
ly quiet. To Duncan it seemed that the silence was more terrifying than the howling and the shrieking. The hoofbeats of Daniel and Beauty rang out sharp and clear, like the beating of a drum by which they marched to an unknown, but a certain doom.

  Again the wind took up and the voices came once more, if they were voices and not his imagination. And now above the shrieks of fear and the screams of agony one voice boomed out, drowning all the others. The voice kept saying, “Holy! Holy! Holy!” the one word repeated over and over again, each repetition of it embodying an ecstatic and terrifying fervor. At times it seemed to Duncan that the one word was quite clear, and at other times he could not be entirely certain of it, although a moment later he would be convinced that he had heard the word correctly. But whether clear or uncertain, it carried in it that unsettling, almost embarrassing fervor of euphoric rapture — the kind of rapture to which a condemned soul might give expression should it suddenly and unexpectedly be raised from the torture of Purgatory to the very gates of Heaven.

  Duncan put his hands to his ears to shut out the sound of that joyous paean, and when he took them away a few moments later, Conrad was shouting up ahead.

  “Light!” he was yelling. “I can see light. We are coming to the end.”

  Staring fixedly ahead, Duncan could see no light, although that was not greatly to be wondered at, for here the trail was exceptionally narrow and Daniel’s big body filled the most of it, blocking his view. But in a short while he could distinguish a faint glimmer that made the walls of stone a little brighter. The ecstatic voice still was shouting “Holy!

  Holy! Holy!” but as the light grew stronger, the sound lost its strength and some of its ecstasy and finally faded out entirely. The shrieking of the wind came to be no more than a mumble and the damned souls grew silent and ahead he could see a glimpse of the green and pleasant land that Snoopy had told them of.